Via the Seed Zeitgeist (I love those guys!) comes this Australian ad for a Ricoh printer:
It’s a funny commercial, in my opinion. It may play into stereotypes, but since I loathe the fashion industry on several (non-degenerate) levels, I am OK with that.
What’s very interesting indeed, though, is that the exact lines uttered by the models were directly plagiarized from Scott Aaronson’s lecture notes on QM!
He is unsure what to do. I don’t think he can sue, which is a shame. It’s funny: a lot of the time, what you put up on the intertubes is up for grabs. There are some restrictions, but it’s not always clear what is stealing and what isn’t.
I get requests from people who want to use what I write for education purposes, or different venues. I almost always allow it, as long as they aren’t making money on it, and in general all I ask is for the credit and a link back to the site, if possible.
On the other hand, if they don’t ask permission, I’d be ticked. My recourse would be to ask them to give me the credit and the link, but let them use it.
But in Scott’s case, we have a major company essentially stealing his lines and using them in a for-profit business. His commenters have lots of suggestions, but I figure a little more publicity can’t hurt. Plus, I like the idea of publicly shaming Ricoh.
What say you all? What are his options?
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Actually, it smacks of fair use. It’s not being used in it’s original context for its original effect. It’s almost tangential to the point of the ad, and therefore its very non-essential nature fails to justify the plagiarism label.
At least, that’s how I see it.
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Where goeth my comment?
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:57 pm
The expropriation of intellectual property is as rampant as it is wrong. This reminds me of a geology professor who told the NSF that he had done this neat piece of work that required funding to expand and complete. Meaningful work. Important to the profession. This was a boating accident from the beginning; that man conducted not one iota of the work that his proposal was based upon. That man never mentioned in the NSF proposal that his Ph.D. student, in concert with other two other professors, had done all of the work he attributed to himself and his research group from another country. That man got the grant, removed the samples from his student under threat of arrest, and published the work his student had begun and had been blocked from finishing under threat of arrest. ARREST! That man, whose father sold aluminum pots and pans from door to door, never credited his former student for one damned thing. The phrase “get a rope†comes to mind when I think about this.
You cannot give a life sentence, or the death penalty, to a copy-machine company, but you can sue the hell out of them and make them look as bad as they are. Or, more likely, you can make them rat out the advertisement agency that took the intellectual property of someone else and turned it into something designed to sell office machines.
Of course, the advertisement agency will only fire the ad-exec who headed the campaign.
If John Fogerty can be sued for self-plagiarism because he wrote new songs that were too similar to songs written by John Fogerty, then the copy-machine company and their advertising agency should be hounded for this.
Gack….
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Well, they are selling copy machines…..
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:17 pm
I’ll have to agree with the first poster. This ad really looks to a be a clear fair-use of copyrighted work. Of course, it would have been nice for them to have informed him and/or credited him somehow, but I don’t think he has a copyright infringement claim.
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:29 pm
To kitch,
To be fair, Fogerty not only won his suit, but successfully countersued to get all his attorney’s fees paid for by the guy who sued him. This is actually one of the places where IP law came out on the right side, and in fact set up a precedent (Fogerty v. Zaentz) to help people fight frivolous lawsuits.
I don’t mean to start an argument about the prevailing issue – I totally agree about the misappropriation of intellectual property. This is just one of my pet legal cases, I’m a bit of an IP law buff (hoo boy, doesn’t my life sound exciting?).
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:44 pm
I’m sorry I don’t usually comment just to lol at another comment.. but DAMN, Thomas. I think I shot coffee out my nose.
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Oh, looks like they’re already getting somewhere with this…
LINK to Sydney Morning Herald article
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Gah, sorry, will use tinyurl next time.
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:53 pm
Not a lawyer, but this surely cannot be covered under “fair use”. If they had repeated the lyrics of a verse from a Beatles pop song as the script without permission, do you think that McCartney would not have recourse to sue?
There was no attribution, no context within which it could have been said to be fairly used (say, as a quote in an article about quantum physics) and it was used as the entire script of a for-profit vehicle.
There are far too many lawsuits in this day and age, but in this case, if the author cannot get fair compensation for his work appearing in that ad, then I believe that he should take them to court. It is nothing but theft, and if you read through the comments, the ad agency is already denying they stole the material. Someone got paid for writing that ad. He should at least get the same money as the copywriter who plagiarized his work.
I don’t think he should win millions of dollars in punitive damages since he’s not really been hurt by this episode, but he deserves fair and reasonable compensation. The ad agency will have been paid a bundle for the ad. A few thousand off the top is going to hurt them less than the publicity over a law suit will. They should settle.
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 am
Okay, so the ad agency is saying that they think they didn’t steal his material, but even if they did, it’s okay because the copyright act doesn’t cover his lecture, but even if it did, it would be fair use anyway.
Sounds like the classic CYA exercise to me. I’d bet you anything that someone in the company has already been raked over the coals for this one.
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:24 am
Hey Phil, on a related note: have you looked at a Creative Commons license for your own stuff? Appropriate for you if you are by and large happy with people using your stuff with the proviso they acknowledge its source.
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:16 am
So when they wanted two stereotypically dumb models to sound uber smart, they quoted Scott Aaronson. The ad men probably googled “quantum mechanics.’ Admittedly it should have been obvious to them to change the wording a little, but I don’t really see any harm done. I feel that a lawsuit would only make Scott look petty.
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:46 am
Scott didn’t lose any money, and even though the email from the ad agency was hardly apologetic he should feel flattered and buy an HP printer.
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:47 am
IANAL, but I’ve read USC 17-107 and I’ve gotten rather familiar with Fair Use due to my wranglings with Bart Sibrel and atrologer James Young over my use of their material for debunking purposes in Bogosity.
There is absolutely nothing in the law that says that Fair Use doesn’t apply to commercial purposes. These were just a couple of lines, about the very basis of QM, which IMO anyone with any knowledge of the subject could have written.
The big question around Fair Use is, has the copyright holder’s work been used to such an extent that it could be sufficiently recreated without having to purchase the original work, and thus denying him a sale?
In this case, I think the answer is clearly no, and therefore it is absolutely Fair Use.
I really wish people would get over themselves sometimes. This was just two sentences, about the very basics of what QM is, and I don’t see any way that it harms Aaronson or costs him anything in loss of sales or lecture attendance.
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:47 am
In response to Tacitus. Not only wouldn’t McCartny and the Lennon estate have no recourse to sue, but fair use quotations from their songs happens *all the time* in modern media. So much so that “in the words of the song, all you need is love” has become a cliché.
I’m afraid I have to agree, that this advert’s use of the phrase was fair use, and the fair use sword cuts both ways. You can’t complain about big companies squashing fair use, and at the same time complain if big companies use fair use to their advantage. Big companies have the same right to fair use as the rest of us.
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:53 am
To clarify my above comment (I should really reread these things before posting):
Commercial use IS a factor to consider in determining whether a work is Fair Use, but what I meant to say was that the fact that it is commercial alone is not in and of itself a reason for denying it. For-profit movies, documentaries, etc. exploit fair use all the time even though they make a profit.
The other factors are (directly quoting the law): the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole, and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
#2 might be debatable, but #3 is so minimal and #4 practically nonexistent that I can’t see any case of infringement being made.
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:55 am
I’d definitely talk to a lawyer. He may not be able to win a lawsuit, but there’s probably a chance that the ad agency would be willing to make a settlement of some kind to make the issue disappear. When you consider the amounts of money involved in advertising, a few thousand dollars to avoid a potential headache might be considered well worth it. (Not that I really have any idea what I’m talking about here.)
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:29 am
It looks a lot like this funny clip from Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Jim Carrey:
http://www.nbc.com/Late_Night_with_Conan_O‘Brien/video/#mea=64956
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:07 am
Sure he can sue! Why not? Instead of second-guessing the potential efficacy of the case along precedent lines, why NOT let the legal system as it plays out in court decide whether his case is justified? Just get it there and see what happens.
All he has to lose is money in the form of legal bills.
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:35 am
If he does sue, I imagine we’ll see another BHA (BHP?).
October 3rd, 2007 at 6:40 am
He should get a date with the models. Duh.
did
October 3rd, 2007 at 7:35 am
From this reader’s perspective, I do not see it as being very wrong at all. It may have been rude and lazy, how hard is it to change a couple of words around, but I do not think it should be grounds for a lawsuit.
All of the other examples listed above allude to stealing intellectual property. It is called stealing because it is not fair to the individual who made the discovery or wrote the groundbreaking paper. This example is not like that. The concepts and ‘intellectual property’ which was quoted in the commercial is by no means novel or groundbreaking. The only reason why it is made to sound bad is because the string of words spoken were in the same order as the lecturer.
The only reason a lawsuit would be valid is if they stole intellectual concepts from another source and claimed them as their own instead of using a particular string of words. They did not steal the concepts being spoken because the principles of quantum mechanics do not belong to the lecturer referenced.
If they do get sued, I am going to hire a lawyer to follow me around and copyright every sentence I utter.
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:43 am
It’s probably fair use (although fair use is a defense and can only be definitively determined in an actual trial). The work is transformative and has negligible impact on the market for the physics lectures. The purpose of the copying (commercial) is a factor, but probably not the determining one in this case.
But that’s not to say Aaronson shouldn’t be compensated. A letter from a lawyer to the ad agency (cc:ing Ricoh’s VP of marketing) seeking compensation (not threatening a suit–the fact that it’s from a lawyer says enough) should generate a few thousand bucks.
It’s not so much about copyright as about reputable business practices. An ad agency that makes its living via the creative process should be keenly attuned to the need to compensate people for their creative input.
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:52 am
From the Sydney Morning Herald artilce linked in a comment above:
“While Ricoh Australia accepts there are certainly incidental similarities between the script and Dr Aaronson’s lecture, out of its original context, the sentence’s purpose has been transformed from education to entertainment,” a spokeswoman said.
I think that right there indicates that the ad company is full of it. “Incidental”? They’re identical! Obviously, they are in full spin mode.
Like I said, I doubt he can sue, but if this were me, I would be most upset about the lack of attribution. So much of this could have been prevented by the company exercising simple politeness, and just by asking permission.
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:56 am
I’ll add that this did happen to me– the makers of “West Wing” lifted an entire line from my website to use in their show (http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/egg_spin.html). I might make the case it was more egregious than what happened to Scott: in the show, they actually made a point of saying it came from the website “thingsthatarewrong.com”! It would have been trivial for them to contact me and ask permission; I would have accepted as long as they mentioned the site. Instead, they figured (correctly) that there wasn’t much I could do about it. I was excited when it first happened, though pretty disappointed; I still love the show, but I grit my teeth about that incident.
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:04 am
I would feel kinda honored if someone managed to find something I wrote and incorporated it into a pretty funny commercial.
A little rewording would have helped avoid the copyright issue, or perhaps a small citation under the picture of the copier might have been nice. However, I still would be flattered.
WWAD? What would Asimov have done? I suspect he would have laughed heartily and found a way to use the commercial to promote or illustrate his own lectures or articles.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Ricoh lawyers sued You Tube for stealing “intellectual property?”
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:18 am
I don’t like the idea that they did it without asking permission, but I must say that if anyone used a line I came up with, I would have no problem with them using it for commercial purposes (educational or not). But again, it should always be asked.
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:43 am
nah – no lawyers in MY family! But I agree with those who suggest this is an example of Fair Use (as a legal term). I’m not sure I’d consider it fair use (as an ethical concept), but since when have ethics and the advertising profession even been on the same street, much less the same bus?
The author probably has no legal recourse, and the ad agency should have (and should now) offer him compensation. Legal recourse may be a non-option, but if he can make a big enough stink about it, Ricoh will lose sales. Maybe only a fraction of a percent – but if you doubt they’d be unaware or uncaring about it, think again. These companies didn’t get to be huge by not caring about the last bent penny.
Being at work I can only skim the related links… did I miss something where Scott Araonson himself expresses dismay over the appropriation of a few lines he wrote?
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:01 am
Let’s not go over the edge into IP extremism. The fair-use doctrine that protects Ricoh protects average citizens like me and you when we criticize books and movies on our blogs. The same doctrine allows the Daily Show to use Fox News clips without permission, and permits artists to extensively sample and distort the works of other artists to create a whole new original work from that of others.
Could you imagine having to attribute every single line you use from a popular movie? The law doesn’t recognize popularity in copyright, as a matter of leveling the playing field.
I can understand the idea that people may want to be asked for permission before fair-use is applied. However, according to the law as it stands, getting a “no” does not restrict the rights of the inquirer to use the work anyway. This means the creation of an extra-legal tradition of asking permission may soon become a socially restrictive standard. Don’t believe me? Look at the case of one Keith Ellison and his Qur’an oath. Look at the poisonous societal stink over a perfectly legal act was ultimately innocuous.
Similarly, could you imagine if Fox News could apply that kind of societal pressure to the Daily Show for using clips that criticize Fox without permission? Don’t tell me it’s any different, complacency and tradition is how we ended up with common-law marriage. In an age where companies are suing people left and right in a flurry of IP extremist lawsuits and lobbyists roam Washington, fair-use is far from evil.
There is a myth that fair-use is ill defined. It’s very well defined, and easy to figure out on one’s own. Let’s not give those companies the societal support they need to push amendments and convolutions to a perfectly clear law. If that means we have things yanked unceremoniously from our blogs every now and again, so be it. Just remember that what it means we can put in our blogs in return.
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:34 am
Phil, regarding the wholesale lifting of your “one of the silliest misconceptions around” line, if you Google that phrase now, you’ll see that it (and other content) have now been used elsewhere as well…
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:46 am
Although the line was plagiarized, the play for comedic effect based on our stereotypes was very successfull. I thought it definately was a funny commercial, and even though there wasn’t a disclaimer, it wasn’t as though the whole lecture series was used.
On the other hand, the fact that these giant corporations feel as though they can plagiarize the intellectual property of others does make me somewhat angry. What’s to stop them at a few paragraphs? This kind of rationale could be extended and applied to all sorts of intellectual theft. If I had written those lines, I would have hoped to get some credit for it. The West Wing stealing lines from Phil must be an example of how blatant these bastards are, when looking for something original to write. Maybe they should all keep a scientist, or a science writer on staff for these types of situations.
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:07 pm
[...] means of money (which is what all quantum physicists really care about, of course) or even credit. Others have brought this up already, so I don’t want to go any more into it, but it would be hypocritical of us to post it [...]
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:41 pm
While I will concede that I have no idea if “fair use” applies in this case, the examples of fair use people are citing in this thread are qualitatively different from the ad in question. The Daily Show uses clips in satirical pieces on their show. Bloggers use quotes from other people (almost always attributed in some way) either as links to the original material, or as part of a longer blog entry which discusses it. Both perfectly fine.
Again, I would equate this more with someone lifting a passage straight from a book or the lyrics of a song and using them as the entire script for a new creative piece. While using the odd phrase that has become a famous and ubiquitous quotation like “All you need is love” would surely be considered fair use, I fail to see how an ad agency would be able to get away with, say, the whole first of the Beatles classic “Help” without falling foul of copyright law.
Anyway, I know the odds of winning a law suit are minimal, and the sad thing is that the ad agency will continue to lie about their conduct rather than admit they are at fault because they no doubt fear that they would leave themselves open to a law suit. If they’d have simply used common courtesy in the first place, none of this fuss needed to have happened.
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:35 pm
“I’ll add that this did happen to me– the makers of “West Wing†lifted an entire line from my website to use in their show [...]”
A long time ago, I made a quip about the English language [1]. It’s since appeared on t-shirts, in sig-files, in an English as a Second Language text over in China and more recently, it’s been showing up in SF books. The Red Chinese asked permission but the SF writers never do, even when they know who said it. Sometimes they don’t and are under the impression that it’s [trad].
I was very alarmed when it was attributed to Captain James T. Kirk in one Trek novel because I reeeally don’t want a million Trekkies arguing that Kirk said it first but the author and I worked something out.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll#The_Purity_of_the_English_Language
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:48 pm
There’s something about this that you’re all missing:
Because of all this BS brouhaha that’s being generated about it, FAR MORE PEOPLE ARE WATCHING THE COMMERCIAL THAN EVER WOULD HAVE OTHERWISE.
They won. You handed them the victory. It’s the “Only The Good Die Young” effect in action yet again.
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Maybe it’s just an Australian thing?
http://www.switched.com/2007/09/21/virgin-mobile-steals-teens-flickr-photo-for-ad/
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:28 pm
It always depresses me to see people so quick to jump on the lawsuit bandwagon. Regardless of whether he has a case or not, if Aaronson did sue, I wouldn’t be able to see it as anything other than him playing the legal system to make a dishonest quick buck. The case might not be amusing or wacky enough to make the Stella Awards–but I’d put it in that category for sure. Fortunately, from his blog post, I get the impression that the lawyer comment was made tongue-in-cheek.
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:18 pm
Ricoh isn’t always the best player when it comes to advertizing. You may remember a couple of years ago their campaign using a speaker of a click language from southern Africa- where the chief could tell his people to do this and that with just a handful of simple clicking noises. The linguistics community went ballistic, and started a counter-campaign to have the ads take off. If their ad people had done any homework at all they’d have known that these are the most complex languages on earth. BAD COMPANY!
Still one expects their ability to copy others’ works to be excellent….
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:57 pm
There are examples in the UK, at least, where people have sued for nominal monetary amounts. They simply sought to have it on public record that the person or entity they sued (usually a tabloid) was in the wrong.
October 3rd, 2007 at 10:26 pm
I have to agree it’s rude and uncivilised for the ad agency to use the lines without having the courtesy to inform the original author, and silly not to have changed the lines a little so that they weren’t a direct copy, but that’s all. Even if it weren’t a parody — c’mon, catwalk models discussing QM, of course it’s parody — it wouldn’t be an offence worth litigating over.
On the other hand, you can hardly blame the ad agency for not seeking permission, because it is such a trivial use. Do they really have to get into negotiating with an author just for a few words? Waste time and sleep bouncing emails and phone calls across the dateline? Waste money calling in their corporate lawyer to draft a contract so that the agency won’t be open to litigation? There has to be a certain level of triviality below which it’s just too complicated — “The law does not concern itself with trifles”.
Personally I’d be tickled pink if I was quoted in an ad, providing it was for something good what I wrote, and not something I’d be embarrassed to have quoted. Even without credit, it would still be worth mad props.
October 4th, 2007 at 12:42 am
NelC,
I think you are missing the point. It is a parody, but it’s not a parody of QM or of Aaronson’s work. Since he is not the subject of the parody, I’m not sure it is fair use to steal his words.
And it wasn’t just a few words; it was the entire script of the commercial. It might have only been a small part of Aaronson’s lecture, but it was *all* of the commercial.
I don’t know if he can sue (in the US he could, since you can sue anyone for anything, but Australian law is probably different), and I don’t know if he would win if he did (IANAL, but others here claiming to have some knowledge say he wouldn’t prevail), but if I were him (he? – the English language purists want to get on this?), I would at least talk to a lawyer about it.
The best outcome would be if he gets some free publicity out of this, people check out his lectures, he gets a fat book deal, and inspires a new generation of skeptics and models who actually know something about quantum mechanics. That, or he gets to meet the models.
October 4th, 2007 at 4:53 am
Shane Killian -
“Get over yourself” ignores the real tragedy of all this. As do many of the other comments here. The real issue is reflected in my name – civility. We have slowly, but with increasing speed, walked away from it. We no longer seem to care much, as a society or even a world, about other human beings. If he said it or wrote it, he should be given the courtesy of being asked. If it was used, he should be credited.
If he said, “no”, the ad agency could have used other words, or worked with someone else to get their script written. Or used them anyway and risked a lawsuit, and, if the rest of us cared (were civil), we would shun the product when we discovered the truth.
There are millions, if not billions of lines that could have been written with the same effect as those used in the ad. Instead of being creative or hiring someone to write them, they plagiarized someone else’s work and got paid for it.
I don’t care what the law says, using someone else’s work and implying it is your own, or profiting from it without citing the author is uncivil, and, as a result, uncaring. If we continue on this path, we are doomed as a species.
October 4th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
I vaguely remember seeing that, in a movie or TV show for instance, it is not legally required to blur out company logos that just happen to be in the scene. (Like if the subject of a documentary walks past a Nike billboard, for instance) Nonetheless, some of those companies whose logos show up demand compensation, and get it. Apparently the legally correct answer of “Go home” isn’t as easy as the payoff.
Maybe it has to do with the salaries of the lawyers involved, or am I being cynical?
October 5th, 2007 at 9:42 am
BaldApe: the ridiculous thing about it is, these same companies pay other movie-makers to PUT their logos in the movie. That’s because having their logo on screen is a benefit to them. It’s free advertising, period.
The fact that they “demand compensation” for people who are “stealing their intellectual property” by doing EXACTLY the same thing they pay others to do, completely validates the point I was making earlier.
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